Boundaries: establish and destroy

Vito Acconci investigated the space for presentation and real action through video recording and transmission onto screens in his video art work “Claim” and “Pryings”. When exploring the notion of space in video media and its exhibition, the artist played with an idea of boundaries.

When watching these two videos, I find myself physically uncomfortable with the content and it's really hard to finish them. 

In "Claim", Acconci was blindfolded and yelling aggressive words with a crowbar in hands. He's using his sayings and body movements to build a boundary between himself and the rest of his world. The performance was held inside a small cell under the gallery space, making the boundary between the live performance and the exhibition space was real and physical. The physical boundary can be the gallery floor or walking stairs. However, even after understood the fact that the performance was live and live-recorded and projected into the gallery space, the audience would not notice the physical boundary when they watching the monitor. Instead, the phycological boundary was established and became much stronger.
As we know, even though all the audience knew that they can go downstairs to interrupt the performance, no one ever did that. Maybe because the audience were afraid of the performer, or they felt it's strange to go out of the gallery space to watch an art. Anyway, the phycological boundary worked. I imagined myself watching this art piece personally in a gallery, and I would not go to the cell neither. Simply because I felt the performance was so real and it broke the boundary between performance and reality, therefore I saw clearly the boundary between normal (me and gallery) and abnormal (Acconci and the cell), and I rejected to go across such a boundary. 

Such phycological boundary also appeared when I watching "Pryings". I felt physically uncomfortable and no longer want to go further. In the video, Acconci was trying to open the woman's eyes by force. He wanted to go across the physical boundary in a human body. Keep your eyes open is a metaphor, which can mean let someone see and understand and accept. The woman resisted to open her eyes, even when her eyelids were opened the woman hided her iris. She was trying to stay inside her body boundary and rejected to accept the masculinity force.  Since eyes are very fragile parts in human bodies, audience would feel spontaneously uncomfortable and attacked by viewing the video. Therefore, the audience outside the space of live performance/action would easily feel the violation. The physical and physiological violation breaks down the boundary between performance and reality, and then makes the boundary of performed action and displayed action uncertain.